The Barbarous Coast (17 page)

“What happened to him?”

“Hester stole from him, too,” she said with a certain complacency. “That is, I can’t swear that she did, but I’m morally certain of it. Miss Hamblin, his secretary, is a friend of mine, and I hear things. Mr. Bassett was dreadfully upset the day she left.” She leaned toward me across the table: I could see the barred rib-cage between her breasts. “And Miss Hamblin said he changed the combination of his safe that very day.”

“All this is pretty tenuous. Did he report a theft?”

“Of course he didn’t. He never said a word to anybody. He was too ashamed of being taken in by her.”

“And you’ve never said a word to anybody, either?”

“Until now.”

“Why bring it all out now?”

She was silent, except for her drumming fingers. The
lower part of her face set in a dull, thick expression. She had turned her head away from the source of light, and I couldn’t see her eyes. “You asked me.”

“I didn’t ask you anything specific.”

“You talk as if you were a friend of hers. Are you?”

“Are
you?”

She covered her mouth with her hand, so that her whole face was hidden, and mumbled behind it: “I thought she was my friend. I could have forgiven her the wallet, even. But I saw her last week in Myrin’s. I walked right up to her, prepared to let bygones be bygones, and she snubbed me. She pretended not to know me.” Her voice became deep and harsh, and the hand in front of her mouth became a fist. “So I thought, if she’s suddenly loaded, able to buy clothes at Myrin’s, the least she can do is repay me my hundred dollars.”

“You need the money, do you?”

Her fist repelled the suggestion, fiercely, as if I’d accused her of having a moral weakness or a physical disease. “Of course I don’t need the money. It’s the principle of the thing.” After a thinking pause she said: “You don’t like me the least little bit, do you?”

I hadn’t expected the question, and I didn’t have an answer ready. She had the peculiar combination of force and meanness you often find in rich, unmarried women. “You’re loaded,” I said, “and I’m not, and I keep remembering the difference. Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters. You don’t understand.” Her eyes emerged from shadow, and her meager breast leaned hard against the table edge. “It isn’t the money, so much. Only I thought Hester
liked
me. I thought she was a true friend. I used to coach her diving, I let her use Father’s pool. I even gave a party for her once—a birthday party.”

“How old was she?”

“It was her eighteenth birthday. She was the prettiest
girl in the world then, and the nicest. I can’t understand—what happened to all her niceness?”

“It’s happening to a lot of people.”

“Is that a crack at me?”

“At me,” I said. “At all of us. Maybe it’s atomic fallout or something.”

Needing a drink more than ever, I thanked her and excused myself and found my way to the drinking-room. A curved mahogany bar took up one end of it. The other walls were decorated with Hollywood-Fauvist murals. The large room contained several dozen assorted couples hurling late-night insults at each other and orders at the Filipino bartenders. There were actresses with that numb and varnished look, and would-be actresses with that waiting look; junior-executive types hacking diligently at each other with their profiles; their wives watching each other through smiles; and others.

I sat at the bar between strangers, wheedled a whisky-and-water out of one of the white-coated Filipinos, and listened to the people. These were movie people, but a great deal of their talk was about television. They talked about communications media and the black list and the hook and payment for second showings and who had money for pilot films and what their agents said. Under their noise, they gave out a feeling of suspense. Some of them seemed to be listening hard for the rustle of a dropping option. Some of their eyes were knowing previews of that gray, shaking hangover dawn when all the mortgage payments came due at once and the options fell like snow.

The man on my immediate right looked like an old actor and sounded like a director. Maybe he was an actor turned director. He was explaining something to a frog-voiced whisky blonde: “It means it’s happening to you, you see. You’re the one in love with the girl, or the boy,
as the case may be. It’s not the girl on the screen he’s making a play for, it’s you.”

“Empathy-schwempathy,” she croaked pleasantly. “Why not just call it sex?”

“It isn’t sex. It includes sex.”

“Then I’m for it. Anything that includes sex, I’m for it. That’s my personal philosophy of life.”

“And a fine philosophy it is,” another man said. “Sex and television are the opium of the people.”

“I thought marijuana was the opium of the people.”

“Marijuana is the
marijuana
of the people.”

There was a girl on my left. I caught a glimpse of her profile, young and pretty and smooth as glass. She was talking earnestly to the man beside her, an aging clown I’d seen in twenty movies.

“You said you’d catch me if I fell,” she said.

“I was feeling stronger then.”

“You said you’d marry me if it ever happened.”

“You got more sense than to take me seriously. I’m two years behind on alimony now.”

“You’re very romantic, aren’t you?”

“That’s putting it mildly, sweetheart. I got some sense of responsibility, though. I’ll do what I can for you, give you a telephone number. And you can tell him to send the bill to me.”

“I don’t want your dirty telephone number. I don’t want your dirty money.”

“Be reasonable. Think of it like it was a tumor or something—that is, if it really exists. Another drink?”

“Make mine prussic acid,” she said dully.

“On the rocks?”

I left half my drink standing. It was air I needed. At one of the marble-topped tables in the court, under the saw-toothed shadow of a banana tree, Simon Graff was sitting
with his wife. His gray hair was still dark and slick from the shower. He wore a dinner jacket with a pink shirt and a red cummerbund. She wore a blue mink coat over a black gown figured with gold which was out of style. His face was brown and pointed, talking at her. I couldn’t see her face. She was looking out through the windscreen at the pool.

I had a contact mike in my car, and I went out to the parking-lot to get it. There were fewer cars than there had been, and one additional one: Carl Stern’s sedan. It had Drive-Yourself registration. I didn’t take time to go over it.

Graff was still talking when I got back to the poolside. The pool was abandoned now, but wavelets still washed the sides, shining in the underwater light. Hidden from Graff by the banana tree, I moved a rope chair up against the windscreen and pressed the mike to the plate glass. The trick had worked before, and it worked again. He was saying:

“Oh, yes, certainly, everything is my fault, I am your personal
bête noire
, and I apologize deeply.”

“Please, Simon.”

“Simon who? There is no Simon here. I am Mephisto Bête Noire, the famous hell husband. No!” His voice rose sharply on the word. “Think a minute, Isobel, if you have any mind left to think with. Think of what I have done for you, what I have endured and continue to endure. Think where you would be if it weren’t for my support.”

“This is support?”

“We won’t argue. I know what you want. I know your purpose in attacking me.” His voice was smooth as butter salted with tears. “You have suffered, and you want me to suffer. I refuse to suffer. You cannot make me suffer.”

“God damn you,” she said in a rustling whisper.

“God damn me, eh? How many drinks have you had?”

“Five or ten or twelve. Does it signify?”

“You know you cannot drink, that alcohol is death for
you. Must I call Dr. Frey and have you locked up again?”

“No!” She was frightened. “I’m not drunk.”

“Of course not. You are sobriety personified. You are the girl ideal of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union,
mens sana in corpore sano
. But let me tell you one thing, Mrs. Sobriety. You are not going to ruin my party, no matter what. If you cannot or will not act as hostess, you will take yourself off, Toko will drive you.”

“Get
her
to be your hostess, why don’t you?”

“Who? Who are you talking about?”

“Hester Campbell,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re not seeing her.”

“For business purposes. I have seen her for business purposes. If you have hired detectives, you will regret it.”

“I don’t need detectives, I have my sources. Did you give her the house for business purposes? Did you buy her those clothes for business purposes?”

“What do you know about that house? Have you been in that house?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Yes.” The word hissed like steam escaping from an overloaded pressure system. “I make it my business. Were you in that house today?”

“Maybe.”

“Answer me, crazy woman.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.” She began to call him names in a low, husky voice. It sounded like something tearing inside of her, permitting the birth of a more violent personality.

She rose suddenly, and I saw her walking across the patio in a straight line, moving among the dancers as though they were phantoms, figments of her mind. Her hip bumped the door frame as she went into the bar.

She came right out again, by another door. I caught a glimpse of her face in the light from the pool. It was white
and frightened-looking. Perhaps the people frightened her. She skirted the shallow end of the pool, clicking along on high heels, and entered a
cabaña
on the far side.

I strolled toward the other end of the pool. The diving tower rose gleaming against a bank of fog that hid the sea. The ocean end was surrounded by a heavy wire fence. From a locked gate in the fence, a flight of concrete steps led down to the beach. High tides had gnawed and crumbled the lower steps.

I leaned on the gatepost and lit a cigarette. I had to cup the match against the stream of cold air which flowed upward from the water. This and the heavy shifting sky overhead created the illusion that I was on the bow of a slow ship, and the ship was headed into foggy darkness.

S
OMEWHERE
behind me, a woman’s voice rose sharp. A man’s voice answered it and drowned it out. I turned and looked around the bright, deserted pool. The two were standing close together at the wavering margin of the light, so close they might have been a single dark and featureless body. They were at the far end of the gallery, maybe forty yards away from me, but their voices came quite clearly across the water.

“No!” she repeated. “You’re crazy. I did not.”

I crossed to the gallery and walked toward them, keeping in its shadow.

“I’m not the one who is crazy,” the man was saying. “We know who’s crazy, sweetheart.”

“Leave me alone. Don’t touch me.”

I knew the woman’s voice. It belonged to Isobel Graff. I couldn’t place the man’s. He was saying:

“You bitch. You dirty bitch. Why did you do it? What did he do to you?”

“I didn’t. Leave me alone, you filth.” She called him other names which reflected on his ancestry and her vocabulary.

He answered her in a low, blurred voice I didn’t catch. There were Lower East Side marbles in his mouth. I was close enough to recognize him now. Carl Stern.

He let out a feline sound, a mewling growl, and slapped her face, twice, very hard. She reached for his face with hooked fingers. He caught her by the wrists. Her mink coat slid from her shoulders and lay on the concrete like a large blue animal without a head. I started to run on my toes.

Stern flung her away from him. She thudded against the door of a
cabaña
and sat down in front of it. He stood over her, dapper and broad in his dark raincoat. The greenish light from the pool lent his head a cruel bronze patina.

“Why did you kill him?”

She opened her mouth and closed it and opened it, but no sound came. Her upturned face was like a cratered moon. He leaned over her in silent fury, so intent on her that he didn’t know I was there until I hit him.

I hit him with my shoulder, pinned his arms, palmed his flanks for a gun. He was clean, in that respect. He bucked and snorted like a horse, trying to shake me off. He was almost as strong as a horse. His muscles cracked in my grip. He kicked at my shins and stamped my toes and tried to bite my arm.

I released him and, when he turned, chopped at the side of his jaw with my right fist. I didn’t like men who bit. He spun and went down with his back to me. His hand dove
up under his trouser-leg. He rose and turned in a single movement. His eyes were black nailheads on which his face hung haggard. A white line surrounded his mouth and marked the edges of his black nostrils, which glared at me like secondary eyes. Protruding from the fist he held at the center of his body was the four-inch blade of the knife he carried on his leg.

“Put it away, Stern.”

“I’ll carve your guts.” His voice was high and rasping, like the sound of metal being machined.

I didn’t wait for him to move. I threw a sneak right hand which crashed into his face and rocked him hard. His jaw turned to meet the left hook that completed the combination and finished Stern. He swayed on his feet for a few seconds, then collapsed on himself. The knife clattered and flashed on the concrete. I picked it up and closed it.

Footsteps came trotting along the gallery. It was Clarence Bassett, breathing rapidly under his boiled shirt. “What on earth?”

“Cat fight. Nothing serious.”

He helped Mrs. Graff to her feet. She leaned on the wall and straightened her twisted stockings. He picked up her coat, brushing it carefully with his hands, as though the mink and the woman were equally important.

Carl Stern got up groggily. He gave me a dull-eyed look of hatred. “Who are you?”

“The name is Archer.”

“You’re the eye, uh?”

“I’m the eye who doesn’t think that women should be hit.”

“Chivalrous, eh? You’re going to hate yourself for this, Archer.”